Football is in the air tonight. Really. Even though it’s mid-March, and St. Patrick’s Day is Wednesday, we’re beginning football season on the North Shore.
Three of our Lynn teams — St. Mary’s, Tech and KIPP Academy — open their seasons Friday night (KIPP has the 7 p.m. home game at Manning Field). Division 7 St. Mary’s draws the unenviable task of opening up against two-time Division 1 champ St. John’s Prep (long story, COVID-19-related).
What makes this even more bizarre — if that’s possible — is that while those schools are playing football, Classical and English are playing basketball. The entire sports calendar in Lynn is being crunched into a time slot from March through June because the city’s athletes couldn’t get on the field or in the gym any time sooner.
If it’s Tuesday, this must be … what???
But the very idea of football in the late winter and early spring is nuts. Oh, I know. This is what the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association (MIAA) decided last year. The MIAA voted to postpone the football season until the late winter due to concerns that a roster with that many players would be a COVID-19 superspreader.
However well-intentioned that was/is, it doesn’t address the reality that high school football this time of the year is downright un-American. Football is supposed to be played in the fall. Notwithstanding a few early weeks where temperatures might still be summer-like, you play football as the weather turns colder. There’s a gradual transition into the severely cold weather that usually accompanies a Friday Night Lights festival in mid-November.
I know we’ve had a couple of nice days this week, but we stood an equally good chance here of having the players shovel off the fields before their games (well, they did shovel them off for practices). If this season had started even a week earlier than it did, we’d have gone to Manning Field in weather so cold our faces would have hurt. Think Thanksgiving a few years ago when the highs were in the 20s. Who wants that? And there’s no way to know for sure whether it’ll be that way next week, either.
This upsets the natural rhythm of life, though by now, we should be cool with the reality that COVID has been doing that for the last year. Football was your welcoming committee back to school. It was a new year, with maybe new friends — or at least reunions among old ones — with Friday night being the culmination of the week. You went to the game, had a few laughs, and then all went out to Mickey D’s or someplace like that for an après-game feast.
And if nothing else went right during the season, you had Thanksgiving to anticipate. You could have had the worst team in school history, but it was all new on Thanksgiving. There were no records. You could make up for the entire season by beating Peabody, or English, or Winthrop on Turkey Day.
It wasn’t just the game. It was all the ado that went with the game. Pep rallies, luncheons/banquets. And it was the one day out of the year where high school kids were treated like bonafide celebrities. Guys like Mike Lynch devoted a whole half-hour to Thanksgiving highlights. He even switched team sweatshirts after every commercial. You don’t get that much ink if you win a state championship.
Football is not just a sport. It’s the sport in high school. It rules. It just doesn’t seem to belong in March and April, unless it’s Boston College spring football or something.
Once there was a time when “the football game” was the weekly event in the town. Cheerleaders and bands would march down the streets of the town and into the stadium (I know because I always seemed to get caught up in the Beverly parade every time I went to Hurd Stadium). I know I use the word a lot, but high school football, in the fall, under the lights, with a slight (and I mean slight) chill in the air is one of those slices of Americana that we experience from one end of the country to the other.
It just doesn’t work being played the Friday before St. Patrick’s Day.
But here we are. Call it another COVID casualty. The pandemic denied us our slice of Americana last fall, so we’re doing it now — out of season and with somewhat of a truncated timetable. I certainly admire and appreciate the attempt on the part of school administrators to give these kids whatever part of their moment is available to them. But I can’t help thinking that something very essential is missing.
